11:29 p.m.
Hi,
I'm lost when it comes to the documentation. I know there has been
some debate about it. What copyright the docs shall have in order to
be as useful as possible.
The problem is what options do we have if any? In short: What must we
do to get the various docs up to GPLv3 or later standards?
For some food for thought see James analysis:
"http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xemacs/index.php?title=Man"
Yours
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1:04 a.m.
Mats Lidell writes:
Hi,
I'm lost when it comes to the documentation. I know there has been
some debate about it. What copyright the docs shall have in order to
be as useful as possible.
Please distinguish between "copyright" and "permission". The
copyright notice is a statement of ownership and (in theory, though
not in American practice) when the rights expire. We should be
updating those regularly when we change the files. You should not be
changing any copyright notices in the GPLv3 branch.
What we are doing now is changing the permissions notice, which states
the license terms.
The problem is what options do we have if any? In short: What must
we
do to get the various docs up to GPLv3 or later standards?
For the info files, nothing. Those files are incompatible with the
GPL and will be forever because there is no provision for changing the
license in them at all. Even if we can get permission to change the
license from all authors, most likely we would want to change to the
FDL, not GPL, so that we can merge with GNU docs under the FDL (which
is now and most likely will forever be incompatible with the GPL).
For the docs in etc/ (and a couple of files in the root: PROBLEMS,
INSTALL, README), add the standard notice. COPYING is the GPL itself;
replace that with GPLv3, exactly as distributed by the FSF. I'm not
sure what to do about ChangeLogs. What does the FSF do?
What else is there?
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12:40 p.m.
>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
Stephen> Please distinguish between "copyright" and "permission".
Sorry, and thanks for putting me right again and again because I'm
sloppy with the terms. I mean the license of course! (It is more or
less that you should perform an s/copyright/license/ before reading my
mail ;-))
Stephen> You should not be changing any copyright notices in the GPLv3
Stephen> branch.
I don't think we have done that either, if not by misstake. There are
some files involved.
Stephen> For the info files, nothing. [...]
So all info files can be untouched and we can still go GPLv3 or later
with the rest?
Stephen> For the docs in etc/ (and a couple of files in the root: PROBLEMS,
Stephen> INSTALL, README), add the standard notice.
OK. I'll have a closer look. Among these we have the TUTORIALS which
according to Jerrys GPLv3-analysis has the "old FSF documentation
license". Any problem with that?
Stephen> I'm not sure what to do about ChangeLogs. What does the FSF
Stephen> do?
I haven't checked. I'll do that.
Stephen> What else is there?
I'll try to summarize what we have been doing soon. Most easy cases
are handled but some tricky cases remain. Cases which might not be
tricky at all if you know whar you are doing. Developers can feel free
to clone the GPLv3 repo in order to inspect or contribute.
Yours
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5:18 p.m.
Mats Lidell writes:
OK. I'll have a closer look. Among these we have the TUTORIALS
which
according to Jerrys GPLv3-analysis has the "old FSF documentation
license". Any problem with that?
Yes. That is the license of the texinfo files, and it cannot be
changed without the explicit permission of the authors.
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9:15 p.m.
>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
Stephen> Yes. That is the license of the texinfo files, and it cannot
Stephen> be changed without the explicit permission of the authors.
OK. But is that a problem for going GPLv3 or later? A quick check in
the Emacs repo shows that most TUTORIALS have the old license
still. The English TUTORIAL is GPLv3 or later though! So it seems we
can just let them be!? Am I missing something?
Yours
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4:55 a.m.
Mats Lidell writes:
>>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org>
writes:
Stephen> Yes. That is the license of the texinfo files, and it cannot
Stephen> be changed without the explicit permission of the authors.
OK. But is that a problem for going GPLv3 or later?
No, we just have to say that they're not part of XEmacs if asked, but
they are bundled with XEmacs. Nothing in XEmacs depends on them, they
are data that is read in if available.
A quick check in the Emacs repo shows that most TUTORIALS have the
old license still.
Interesting, but not very surprising. Either the standard for getting
tutorials is lower (ie, no assignment required) and they face the same
problem that we do (authors have disappeared and they can't change the
license), or perhaps it's just a lack of thoroughness on the part of
the people who did the work.
The English TUTORIAL is GPLv3 or later though!
So it seems we can just let them be!?
Yes. *We do not have a choice about the tutorials.* All of our
tutorials derive from our English tutorial, and perhaps Emacs
versions, which have the old license. Therefore they inherit that
license (it is a copyleft license), and we need the permission of all
copyright owners in the chain to change them.
However, since the FSF has historically distributed in this fashion,
apparently they don't consider the tutorials to be part of Emacs, so I
don't see any reason why we shouldn't do the same as they do.
Thanks for following up and checking on "What Emacs Does". It's very
helpful!
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